This big-budget live-action film adaptation could be aptly compared to its title character – cute, but insubstantial. The film gives the appearance of having been construed more as a shrewd collusion of the peoples involved than as any artistic exercise – Steven Spielberg is there as Executive Producer because the film is cute; the digital effects team appear to be there simply because they can do it; and the commercial tie-in people are in on the act for merchandising opportunities. But, other than the three abovementioned influences conducting their various businesses, the film lacks anything of distinction. It works efficiently for the most part. The effects work is expectedly very good. And Christina Ricci, caught just between being the great young find of the Addams Family films and becoming an indie movie queen, plays fairly well in a role that is beneath her talent.

But even before it arrives at its climax, the film’s slight charms have mostly run out. It is impelled along by loud and noisy slapstick, although the pace runs to a halt about two-thirds of the way through (about the time the laboratory is discovered). Throughout, the production design team appear to have bent over backwards to avoid any traditional haunted house look. The cupolas and lanterns seem so over designed, so obviously intended to impress that the effect is contrarily negligible. Indeed, the sets seem so cluttered with self-conscious ornamentation they often cramp the action. There’s a set-piece several minutes long with a chair descending through an automated shaving, showering and powdering system to the laboratory, a sequence that is absurdly oversized and of stunningly little point and serves no purpose that someone opening a door could not have. Once in the laboratory, the resurrection machine for no apparent reason, other than design flourish, is buried under water and activated by a vast steam power system. Between this, the needless oversize and a banal ending where Casper is allowed to return to human form and the appearance of Amy Brenneman as an unconvincing angel wears the film out.

The film’s most memorable aspect are the amusing cameos – when the ghosts possess Bill Pullman they transform his face in a mirror and he momentarily turns into Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson and the Cryptkeeper from Tales from the Crypt (1989-96). There is also an amusing gag with Dan Aykroyd rushing out of the house in his Ghostbusters (1984) uniform yelling “Call somebody else.”

A number of direct-to-video Casper movies were subsequently spun out by children’s entertainment specialists Saban Entertainment with:– Casper: A Spirited Beginning (1997), Casper Meets Wendy (1998) and Casper’s Haunted Christmas (2000).

Director Brad Silberling next continued with afterlife themes in the angel romance City of Angels (1998) and returned to children’s fantasy with Lemony Snicket’s An Unfortunate Series of Events (2004) and the subsequent comedy remake of the tv series Land of the Lost (2009).